I'm so very happy about this.

Thanks Mr. Doherty, PNH, and Charlie and anyone else involved in making this decision.

It will make life much easier for me, and many other vision-impaired ebook users.

This is HUGE! Congratulations Patrick (and Tom)!

Being on a severe dietary restriction of only technical books and the occasional Bujold novel has been rather challenging. Looking forward to gorging on Tor books starting this summer.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen...

Good luck with this brave decision!

I hope this works as well as it should! Congratulations on taking the step.

Pretty rockin'! Yay!

That's great news; thank you to everyone involved!

My eyesight has reached the point where reading paperback-sized type is difficult, so I read almost everything on my Nook now. I'm building a sizable e-book library, and I buy DRM-free whenever possible. Now, thanks to Tor, I have more options. :)

Following on the recent DRM-less Harry Potter ebook release, this is a big, and very welcome, decision. Kudos to Tor!

My goodness, this is good news. I checked the date to make sure it is not april 1.

I now have to go plan my next few dozen book purchases! I have hundreds of Tor books that I have been hoping to get in legitimate e-form. The press release makes it sound like I will be able to get e-pubs that are formatted nicely for my iPad, instead of having to convert them from mobi.

FWIW, I buy a lot of ebooks, and when I like a series, I often buy it in hardcover, too. Thank you for trusting your readership. You completely rock.

Great news! Glad to hear it.

If Cory D. can improve his sales by making all his books available FREE, I can't see how getting rid of DRM can hurt.

Hurrah! I love DRM-free, and I hope this works out really well for y'all. I promise to do my part!

Thank you! This is the best news I've gotten all day.

Congratulations.

What excellent news. I think it may finally be time to buy an e-reader!

This is terrific news, and a long time coming.

One question: will we be able to change existing (DRM'ed) TOR ebooks to non-DRM'ed format? (And are you working with vendors so that it would operate something like when the iTunes music store went from FairPlay [hah] encrypted files to the unencrypted AAC files, where you just had to re-download your existing files from the store, and everything automagically replaced old, DRM'ed versions with new, non-DRM'ed versions?)

Heh. I must have not noticed this when I was posting on the OT, but it's awesome news. Well done, well done indeed.

Congratulations! I don't buy DRM'd books, so a rather large and attractive trove has just opened up to me. There Will Be Downloads.

Story's been Boinged and is about to get Whatevered. We've already had one comment in Spanish at Tor.com. Good news, spreading fast.

That's absolutely brilliant. Wonderful! Marvellous!

I have a question (actually this was raised on Whatever). Is this going to be a drop-dead, where on a particular date all Tor books will suddenly go from being DRM'd to being DRM-free?

I had the impression it was more like all the books would be DRM-free as soon as the pipeline can be reconfigured (with whatever behind-the-scenes mojo that requires) with the full transition complete by July.

The key, of course, to Whatever readers, is whether Redshirts, due out June 4, will be DRM-free right away, or whether e-book users will have to wait until the transition is complete to buy it without DRM.

Excellent!

Congratulations to everyone at Tor on this decision! I hope that you'll be able to show Macmillian that the world didn't come to an end with this change and that others will follow.

An excellent decision, one that will be good for Tor, its authors, and its readers. Congratulations on a bold move.

Will this have any effect on the geographocal availabiltiy of Tor ebooks (and im particular, the unavailability in Turkey of various titles thtatbare avilable elsewhere?) (İ've been told that this is a DRM-related issue, but of course İ may have been misinformed.

I don't know if Charlie Stross will catch this before he departs for the Eurocon, but he has written a great deal about the practicalities of ebook publishing, on why we all need publishers, and on the problems we create with DRM. Sometimes he has seemed the sole voice of reason in the sea of idiocy which promotes the Amazon vanity slushpile.

Try not to ply him with too many drinks at the con.

İ'd like to apologise to anyone who has copy-editor's eyes, and who was unlucky enough to read my 23. Excitement - and an inability to manage a touchscreen keyboard effectively - got the better of me.

Thank you to Patrick and Tom and all the Tor team! Great news for book owners everywhere, IMNSHO!

That is great news!

Gray Woodland @16: Agreed! Particularly if I'm going to buy an electronic version in addition to the dead-tree version, I refuse to buy DRM stuff.

Xopher, #19:

" Is this going to be a drop-dead, where on a particular date all Tor books will suddenly go from being DRM'd to being DRM-free?"

Not clear. Details remain to be worked out.

However, I can tell you that Scalzi's Redshirts will indeed be DRM-free from Day One.

Praisegod Barebones, #23: "Will this have any effect on the geographical availability of Tor ebooks, and in particular, the unavailability in Turkey of various titles that are available elsewhere? (I've been told that this is a DRM-related issue, but of course I may have been misinformed.)"

Well, I hope so. I have no idea why any of our e-books should be unavailable in Turkey -- we have, at the very least, non-exclusive rights to sell practically all of our English-language books there. (Which is to say, we share those rights with other English-language publishers, like for instance the same author's UK publisher.) I can't think of how DRM would have been the problem per se, aside from the fact that it is of course pure evil in all ways.

I don't want to get too deeply into specifics, but it's obvious that going DRM-free will open up some new retail opportunities, over and above the standard set of Amazon, B&N, Apple, Kobo, and Sony. One or more of those may well have no problem taking your money and selling you books. It's kind of disgraceful that this should have been so difficult up to now.

That's very happy news! I hope I have a job and a Nook (or other non-Amazon e-reader) by then!

All right, sounds like it's time for me to bite the bullet and buy myself a tablet. But I don't want to pay $500 for one if I can avoid it, and I need one for which I can also buy an anchoring mechanism.* Suggestions?

* Because I also want to use this as a jewelry display, with a slideshow of products in my inventory. Because of that, I have to be able to secure it to something -- like a cinderblock under the table -- such that somebody can't just grab it and run off. I'd also like an 8x10 screen if possible. I'm okay with buying an older-generation refurb or a used one. Am I chasing the moon here?

Lee @32 - No, this should all be do-able. I haven't looked into anchors, but any tablet should be compatible with an adhesive strong-point that you can connect to a cable lock. Apple is selling refurb'd iPads for $300/$350; you can probably beat that price in the used market. If that's way too expensive, you _may_ be able to use a Nook Color to do what you want.

Thank you! Quite welcome news!

Woohoo!
Now all I'll have to do is work around the georestrictions!

Oh good, now I have a reason to buy a Nook!

Will this policy shift make any difference to the terms that apply if I "buy" an e-book, or is this just a technical update? Is there any chance that I'll actually own an e-book that I buy, in the fine old first-sale sense?

Presumably there would be little point in this change if the license were still to tie me to one or more devices or software instances with a certain retailer's brand. But will I be able to buy, sell, loan, give, or inherit these books, as I can for ones on paper?

At some point in the future, will I be able to buy one for cash in my local used book store, and thereby avoid giving every government snoop and marketing prodnose one more entry in a complete history of all the things I've learned and thought about?

If not, I don't really see this changing my own relationship with the e-book marketplace much, at least for now. Though it may some day help me in the "criminality" that I'll resort to, if that market ever grows to crowd out books I can buy on terms that aren't Orwellian.

Lee #32, VictorS #33: I have a Nook Color. I like it very much as an e-reader and portable editing device, but I wouldn't recommend it for any use where crisp color image quality was of great importance. My recommendation to Lee would be to buy an iPad 2, which Apple now sells new for #399; you can very probably do better on eBay. The general fit, finish, and quality runs rings around other "tablets," and the number of third-party accessories, including anchoring devices, totally beats any competition.

#37, CHoldredge: Those are good questions. If I get any definitive answers to them, I'll let you know.

Speaking entirely as me, and not as any kind of spokesthing for Tor or Macmillan, I'm pretty sure that sometime in the next few months it will be possible for you to buy a Tor ebook the terms of which don't "tie [you] to one or more devices or software instances with a certain retailer's brand." The rest of it--well, I'm not sure we'll have figured out how to meet your exacting standards as soon as you might prefer. Fortunately for all of us, printed books still exist and we're perfectly happy to sell them to you.

Lee @ 32 : I don't know the manufacturer, but I've seen cases for the iPad 1 that were essentially a wraparound plastic case going to a built-in cable lock. A cafe near my lab has this setup for their email-based loyalty program... and it hasn't gone walkabout on them, last I checked.

This is great! How does this exactly work though for say the kindle and ibooks?

Patrick at #39, thank you very much for taking my questions seriously. I really thought they might represent rather fringe concerns, but I took a chance on asking them anyway.

I know what I'm hoping for in an e-book transaction is extremely specific. I expect that I've been 'spoiled' by a lifetime of buying paper books in exactly that way.

You called it exactly, of course. for as as long as it's an alternative in the general marketplace, paper books for paper money is exactly what I'll stick to. If e-books and the demise of bricks and mortar ever make that impossible, I'll just have to figure something else out.

(images of grim old paranoids hanging around a net cafe like teens around a liquor store: "Hey, man, If I give you a fifty, can you buy some Naomi Klein for me?""Come on, be a sport. Just a couple essays of Matt Taibbi, then?")

Looks like I timed buying the e-reader just right. And hopefully, now that Himself is employed again, I can actually afford to buy commercial e-books. Which will be nice (even if the restriction is to one book per month).

Don't get me wrong - Project Gutenberg is great, and now they're getting into the 1920s and 1930s for available books I'm starting to see some of my favourite authors in there (Heyer, Christie, Wodehouse, Montgomery etc). And yeah, fanfic downloaded from AO3 is great and free and readily available (even if the editorial quality isn't the greatest). But I still really miss being able to read the new stuff as soon as it comes out.

Just one quick question - are these books likely to be available (and hopefully DRM-free) in Australia? Or are we going to be caught behind the various Orderly Marketing Arrangements which make the Australian literary marketplace such an interesting and frustrating place to shop?

Bravo! Glad to hear it. Here's hoping that Tor's failure to fall into the swamp once the DRM is removed causes other publishers to follow suit.

Well done everyone involved in this; up to and including the CEO who made the final decision.

I don't normally buy ebooks, but I'm going out to buy a Tor ebook right now just to support this. After all, I can now read it on my phone *and* my laptop.

For those who, like me, haven't jumped into the e-reader pool yet, David Pogue of the NYT has a timely column about them today.

Just hijacking this thread for a second to point out that the second link in PNH's "Libertarianism: Free reign for private tyrannies" sidelight points to MakingLight.

Is that intentional?

(Feel free to delete this post.)

It's nice to see Tor is finally getting to release its books DRM-free. Things are a little different from how they were six years ago, huh?

Would be nice if there were some sort of general declaration of DRM-cracking amnesty: "We hereby promise that we won't sue anyone for breaking the DRM on any e-books we have previously published." Generally meaningless, since there's no way you'd even know if someone broke the DRM in the privacy of his own home, but a nice symbolic gesture. Probably won't happen, but it would be kind of neat if it did.

#48: Oh crap. Thanks for pointing out the bad link. Fixed.

Chris, I doubt they're going to make what would, after all, be a largely symbolic gesture, when they don't know everyone it affects and what they might have done. That may change later, but I don't see it happening soon.

Splendid! I've been staying away from e-books, apart from Steve Jackson Games' line, also DRM-free. Now things can change.

Larry@41: Amazon, Apple, and B&N already sell DRM-free ebooks. I've bought issues of Weird Tales from the iBookstore which were DRM-free. Likewise, I've bought ebooks from B&N which were also DRM-free. (I don't intend to slight Amazon. I just prefer ePubs.) AFAICT, It's the publisher's decision whether or not to add DRM to their offerings.

One of my long-standing gripes with Amazon, Apple, and B&N is that they don't tell you which ebooks they sell are DRM-free. And publishers make some odd decisions. Night Shade books are DRM-free via Baen but are DRMed via B&N. (Yes, I could have just bought God's War from Baen, but at the time, it was free from B&N and I wanted to find out if it was DRMed or not.)

Back when Apple still sold DRMed music, the DRM-free music had a plus sign next to it (and it cost more :(). They dropped that when all of the music they sold became DRM-free. Since Apple sells a mix of DRMed and DRM-free ebooks, I wish they would put a little plus sign next to the DRM-free books.

#41, Larry: I'm not quite sure what you're asking. "How exactly does this work for say the kindle and ibooks?"

First, what we intend is that any Tor books you buy from either Amazon's Kindle store, or Apple's iBooks store, or anywhere else, will be DRM-free. This should be the case whether you buy them directly from a Kindle, from one of Amazon's Kindle apps for various phones and computers, as a direct purchase on Amazon's website, from Apple's iBooks store via iTunes, or from Apple's iBooks store via an iOS device.

Second, nothing we do will fix the fact that Amazon's ebooks are mostly in MOBI format whereas Apple's are mostly EPUB. Even without DRM, an EPUB file is useless on a Kindle, and a MOBI file won't read in Apple's iBooks reading app. (You can install Amazon's free Kindle app onto any iOS device, but that still leaves you with a potential "some ebooks in one place, some in another" problem.) Fortunately, there's an easy solution: the freeware program Calibre, which is available for Windows, OS X, and Linux, does a very good job converting between many different ebook formats. It can certainly convert EPUB to MOBI and vice-versa.

Absent DRM, there's nothing particularly daunting about the fact that different online retailers use different file formats. Cory Doctorow has pointed out that this is a solved problem in most of our digital lives. Browsers routinely display pages that feature PNGs, JPGs, and GIFs, often on the same screen next to one another. We don't have to care; the browser takes care of it for us. Almost every modern word processor can read .doc and .rtf files, and usually a bunch of other file formats as well. Once ebook DRM is a thing of the past, it'll be in everyone's interest to support interoperability -- people will want e-readers and apps that can display any of the major file formats without fuss and bother. But even before that happens, it's our guess the small amount of fuss-and-bother entailed in firing up Calibre and converting e-book files from one format to another, and in figuring out how to sideload to and from various devices and apps, won't be very daunting to most readers of Tor books.

#43, Megpie71: "Just one quick question - are these books likely to be available (and hopefully DRM-free) in Australia? Or are we going to be caught behind the various Orderly Marketing Arrangements which make the Australian literary marketplace such an interesting and frustrating place to shop?"

I don't actually know what e-book retailing arrangements we may have (or be working on) in Australia and New Zealand, but prompted by your question I've put in an inquiry with our digital people. I do note from my Twitter feed, however, that our sister imprint in London, Tor UK, just announced that they'll be going DRM-free as well, and I'm pretty sure their ebooks are available to you. Obviously I need to get better-informed on this.

#46, Josh Berkus: "I don't normally buy ebooks, but I'm going out to buy a Tor ebook right now just to support this."

You might want to hold off...just as a reminder, this will all be in effect by mid-July. It does take us some time to spin down the hamster wheels and recalibrate the improbability drive.

Following up on my #55 to Megpie71, I can confirm that a number of our titles are available to Amazon e-book customers in Australia; basically, those books we have out in digital form for which we have Australian rights.

It's not so much a matter of "Orderly Marketing Arrangements" as it is which authors are willing to sell us what territories. We've generally been very willing to buy (and exercise!) Australian rights, when authors are willing to sell them to us. Most commonly, Australian rights get sold to UK publishers.

Good for Tor!

Also, good for Tor's readers, and every reader everywhere. I hope my publisher follows suit quickly.

Congratulations! This is great news.

Lee @32: I second Patrick's recommendation of an iPad for crisp image rendering; reading comics and manga on this thing is a joy. And you should be able to download a non-Kindle reading app of choice. (I'm a Kobo person.)

Patrick, thanks for the #54, as I'd been wondering if this would lead to DRM-free sales via the Amazon Kindle store.

Megpie71@43:
Project Gutenberg is great, and now they're getting into the 1920s and 1930s for available books I'm starting to see some of my favourite authors in there
With the exception of works that weren't renewed, they don't have anything past 1922, the cutoff before which things are generally out-of-copyright in the US. Under current law, that cutoff won't move on until 2017 -- and I wouldn't trust that it will, since owing to extensions in the meantime, it hasn't moved since 1978.

I'm so very pleased about this, and about the removal of DRM from Macmillan audiobooks, as well. Bravo, and thank you for helping change the paradigm!

I have a friend, a programmer, who reads lots of e-books and owns several types of e-readers. He asked me questions I can't answer. Perhaps this thread is a place to raise them.

If an eBook is only 10-15% cheaper for a publisher than a physical book (they claim that this is the percentage for printing, warehousing, shipping, etc. of the cost of a book), then why are eBooks priced like hard covers and not paperback originals?

Why are paperback originals less than half the price of hardcover originals, if not due to the added bulk in manufacturing and handling, and materials? Authors advances? Amortization over size of print run? Less marketing support?

Patrick @ 30: Thanks - İ was beginning to think that this was a party to which i wasn't invited. Since that seems not to be the case, İ join the general celebration.

i'm not quite sure why i can't get Tor ebooks in Turkey, but Mme Barebones was cursing about not being able to find a way of buying Cherie Priest's Clockwork Century novels a day or two ago. Since she's far more e-competent than me, İ'm taking her word for it. (Part of the problem is that if your account billing address is in Turkey, Amazon won't let you buy DRMd works for the Kindle, and the App market won't let you install the Kindle App on an i-Device (and Barnes and Noble won't let you have an account at all).)

Praisegod, send me an email address where I can reach you?

Bill Higgins #63: "If an eBook is only 10-15% cheaper for a publisher than a physical book (they claim that this is the percentage for printing, warehousing, shipping, etc. of the cost of a book), then why are eBooks priced like hard covers and not paperback originals?"

I don't know, why does your friend think eBooks are priced like hardcovers? Most of our hardcovers are priced betwen $22 and $27.50; the equivalent e-books are priced from $10.99 to $12.99. That's a lot more than a 15% discount. (Not, you'll note, that I'm endorsing that 15% figure as entirely accurate.)

When and if the same titles become trade paperbacks, priced usually from $13 to $18, the e-books are $9.99. If they appear as mass-market paperbacks for $8.99 or less, the e-book price correspondingly drops as well.

"Why are paperback originals less than half the price of hardcover originals, if not due to the added bulk in manufacturing and handling, and materials? Authors advances? Amortization over size of print run? Less marketing support?"

Paperback originals -- I assume he means mass-market paperback originals, since trade paperback originals are rarely "less than half the price of hardcover originals" -- are an odd duck. We don't do very many of them. Other houses do lots. For us, we do them when we think the low price will help us get a truly mass-market level of distribution -- the kind of distribution that genre mass-market paperbacks routinely got thirty years ago. So for us "paperback original" is a way to try to turbo-charge distribution and sales by getting the cover price as far down as possible. Sometimes it even works.

The real fact about the "mass market paperback" channel in genre publishing in 2012 is that not very many "mass market paperbacks", original or not, get anything like what we used to consider mass-market distribution. A lead SF paperback title in the early 1980s could easily ship 75,000 copies--or more. These days a lot of mass-market paperbacks by SF and fantasy writers you think of as major and popular...ship fewer than 15,000 copies; often as few as 5,000. The non-bookstore market -- the supermarkets, drugstores, bus stations and the like -- mostly doesn't take genre fantasy and SF any more, except for the occasional huge-name bestseller or media tie-in. (Authors are not committing suicide in relays because the market for more expensive hardcovers and trade paperback editions of their work has greatly expanded, and more recently of course the e-book market has begin to take off; this makes up some of the lost ground.) So basically, a lot of genre books published in "mass market paperback" these days -- which is to say, they're priced at $8.99 or less and unsold copies are stripped or pulped, not returned to the publisher--are in reality trade paperbacks with a too-small trim size, a too-low price point, and impossibly generous distribution terms. If SF publishers were really ruthless we'd be moving even more of our softcover business out of "mass market" and into trade paperback.

No blame to you, Bill -- you're a great guy -- but all too often I find that pricing discussions give me a giant headache, because the questions are so often predicated on notions that just make me blink and wonder if I'm in a different universe than the person asking. E-books are priced like hardcovers? What? Headache or not, though, I'm willing to answer questions like this so long as I can do so without touching on certain pending legal actions. You're going to have to take for granted that if I ignore certain avenues of inquiry I'm not being evasive, I'm specifically constrained. (Not that I've ever had any role in setting prices; in fact, it's a subject I've generally gone out of my way to avoid, because it's boring as crap.)

I have just been told that Amazon do not sell DRM-free ebooks for the Kindle.

"Please be informed that all the Kindle contents in Amazon.co.uk are DRM protected."

John Chu @53, I've already seen signs of Amazon pulling weasel-word deceits on ebooks in the UK. They tell you that they charge VAT. They don't tell you that, under EU rules, they pay far less than the UK rate of 20%. I am beginning to wonder if my Kindle was a waste of money, fine hardware though it is, because it requires me to do business with crooks and liars.

Dave Bell @ 67... I am beginning to wonder if my Kindle was a waste of money, fine hardware though it is, because it requires me to do business with crooks and liars.

THe Kindle having been spawned by Amazon was enough for me to say "Thanks but no thanks." Besides, I seem to remember our being told here of the time Amazon unilaterally removed from Kindles novels that had already been bought and downloaded. What's that phrase about Hell and sharp temperature drops?

#67, Dave Bell: I'm pretty sure that whoever's telling you "Please be informed that all the Kindle contents in Amazon.co.uk are DRM protected" is, um, misinformed.

I know that Amazon US sells some books without DRM already. (For instance, our e-editions of Cory Doctorow's work.) I also know that Amazon US have taken our announcement in stride and that we-and-they expect to be able to make it all work. And I'm pretty sure the same situation obtains with Amazon UK and our colleagues at Tor UK.

If you clarify where that line comes from, I'd be much obliged.

@68 this drives me crazy. it happened *once* several years ago, and it was an illegal copy. And Amazon has said they'll never do it again. And B&N - and any other company with wifi enabled devices - has the same ability.

There are reasons to be displeased with Amazon, but this isn't one of them.

Yay! Best IPSTP Day Week present evar.

I disagree, becca. It was Amazon's mistake to sell those copies. If you buy a copy of a paper book at the bookstore, and they later discover that they were not legally entitled to sell that particular book, they would not attempt to get it back from you. They certainly would not come into your home, take the book, and leave the money.

Yes, every reader that can purchase books directly has this capacity. Only Amazon has used it.

They say they won't do it again. That statement only came AFTER the public outrage over it. They're not doing it now, but they had to be bullied into promising not to.

When someone comes up with an e-reader hack that keeps sellers from "unselling" books, the world will be a better place.

Well, "No DRM" comes close to making it impossible for a company to re-possess already-sold books. They'd be hard-pressed to delete a book that I'd backed up on a thumb drive or burned to a CD.

True, true, Jim. But I meant something you can do to your Kindle (or whatever) that blocks Amazon (or whomever) from coming in and removing stuff from it...whether you've copied it elsewhere or not. The idea being, you shouldn't have to worry about them doing it.

This is great news. I've moved the great majority of my book purchases to ebooks, and DRM is the only real reason I've been reluctant to do so. The more books are non-DRMed, the more willing I am to buy them.

PNH @69

I've forwarded you the complete email.

Incidentally, Forbes has the story now.

James Moar @61

I'm pretty sure Megpie71 is talking about Project Gutenberg Australia, which operates under the much-less-draconian (for now) copyright laws of Australia. If memory serves, their copyright law is life+50, not "it'll never fall out of copyright ever if it was published after 1922 if Disney has any say in the matter" like the US has.

I sit corrected; Australian copyright had been life+50, but changed to life+70 in 2006. Canadian copyright is still life+50.

So anything published in Australia with an author who died before 1956 is in the public domain there, and anything published in Canada with an author who died before 1962 is in the public domain there, though I'm sure there are exceptions; in copyright law, there always are.

Patrick: if you have easy access to the back-end of ML, the address İ for the site is my usual email address. (İf not, İ'll drop you a line once my brain is up to dealing with email.)

Patrick: if you have easy access to the back-end of ML, the address İ for the site is my usual email address. (İf not, İ'll drop you a line once my brain is up to dealing with email.)

Cally @78

You miscalculated there. Life+70 would be death before 1942.

But all that matters in US copyright law seems to be what happens in the USA.

Cally@77:
Yes, I overlooked the references to Australia in Megpie's post.

Dave Bell @ 81

Actually I didn't miscalculate. Everything that had already fallen into the public domain remained there when Australia went from life+50 to life+70. Now they have to wait another 20 years from when the law was passed for anything new to fall into the public domain.

It's the same reason American public domain books have been stalled at 1922-and-before for over a decade.

Yay, Tom Doherty!!!!!

Within the past year or two the US Supreme Court looked at the Life + 70 years and said it was acceptable, BUT the wording was such that the indication or implication was that if an attempt to extend the protection to a longer duration came to them, they'd balk. Meanwhile, the wording in the body of the US Constitution establishes patents and copyright "for a limited time" on the basis that rewarding people who make inventions and art and literature available to the public, should be encouraged and rewarded for the efforts in getting creations and inventions -to- the public, with, again, a -limited- period of exclusivity before the inventions and work become public domain. The basis of the clause is the benefit of the public of having the inventions and literature/art etc., NOT the benefit for four generations of estate heirs of creators and inventors.

Disney is tno the only culprit, the government of Germany owns the copyright in Germany of Mein Kampf and wants it out of print in Germany until the heat death end of the universe....

The British Government passed a special law to keep Peter Pan permanently out of public domain so that it will continue providing funds to the hospital, is it, that the author designated as literary estate heir for Peter Pan.

In breaking news, the Bavarian government is going to put out a scholarly version of Mein Kampf in advance of the copyright expiry in 2015.

Hitler's writing remains under copyright in the EU for another three years. The copyright is held by the State of Bavaria, who have used this control to block new German editions.

They have today announced a plan to produce an "unattractive" edition of Mein Kampf, annotated to explain what a pernicious heap of crap it is, to counter the easy availability of the text over the Internet.

Speaking of the Beeb, they've covered this story. Not bad, though they get the corporate structure wrong and don't mention the name of the person they spoke to.

Dave Bell @ 86...

I invoke Godwin's Law!
:-)

Not to pick on becca (#70), but her characterization of the edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four that Amazon deleted from some people's Kindles as an "illegal copy" is a good example of the kind of overinflated legal language that Big Copyright has bamboozled us all into using.

What happened is that Amazon inadvertantly sold Kindle editions of a particular edition of Orwell's novel to some American customers. It then turned out that the edition in question was from a publisher that didn't have the right to sell in the US. Amazon used its ability to reach into people's Kindles to delete those copies and refund the purchasers' money; in a few cases, people lost marginal notes that they'd been entering, for school assignments and the like.

What interests me is the notion of an "illegal copy." These weren't anything like "illegal copies." If an American goes to Britain and buy the Gollancz edition of The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi and brings it home to the US, they don't have an "illegal copy," even though Tor owns the US rights to The Quantum Thief. Similarly, if an American phones up a British bookseller and orders a copy of the Gollancz edition, to be shipped to their US address, it's not an "illegal copy" and nothing illegal has taken place. This is because the only legal agreements in force are between authors and publishing companies. Hannu Rajaniemi has "sold" (i.e., licensed) his novel to Gollancz in several territories; Gollancz then "sold" (i.e., licensed) their exclusive right to publish the book in English in North America to Tor. You'll note who's not a party to any of these agreements: our American book buyer and the British bookshop he's buying the Gollancz edition from. They can do as they like.

As it happens, Amazon UK doesn't seem to worry too much about this stuff when it comes to selling printed books to American purchasers. I've more than once logged into amazon.co.uk with my US Amazon ID and my US credit card, and purchased UK editions of books that have different publishers in the US, and had them shipped to me in the US. Amazon is more punctilious about it when it comes to e-books, and generally will tell you "that edition is not available in your territory" or something of the sort. But this is almost certainly because Amazon has made agreements with US and UK publishers to respect the boundaries between selling territories, where e-books are concerned. Once again, these are agreements made under civil law, to which you, the customer, are not a party. If Amazon inadvertantly sells you an edition that isn't supposed to be sold into the territory you live in, that does not make it an "illegal copy." You have infracted nothing. At worst, Amazon has committed an infraction of a civil agreement, an infraction of infinitesmal consequence. This does not make the book in question "illegal." Cops are not entitled to confiscate it. It's not contraband when taken across a border. The copyright police are not going to break down your door.

But the corporados who invented crazy modern phrases like "intellectual property" and who want us to understand that copying an mp3 onto your spouse's iPod is "piracy"...love it when we cooperate with their overweening aspirations by promulgating language like "illegal copy" to describe the product of a transaction that was, for the purchaser, entirely law-abiding. For them, the law is a tool with which to keep everyone else anxious and terrified, so we'll more readily do as we're told. Don't make it easy for them. "Illegal copy," my foot.

Far more about the exact copyright status of Peter Pan here.

"Intellectual property" isn't a particularly modern phrase (unless you are a mediaevalist or classicist), and it was invented not by corporations but by lawyers as a way of grouping several special creatures of statute together: Trade Marks, Copyright, Patents (the oldest), and Industrial Design. The first citations in Google Books seem to come from the early 19th century.

@66...

"I don't know, why does your friend think eBooks are priced like hardcovers? Most of our hardcovers are priced betwen $22 and $27.50; the equivalent e-books are priced from $10.99 to $12.99. That's a lot more than a 15% discount. (Not, you'll note, that I'm endorsing that 15% figure as entirely accurate.)

When and if the same titles become trade paperbacks, priced usually from $13 to $18, the e-books are $9.99. If they appear as mass-market paperbacks for $8.99 or less, the e-book price correspondingly drops as well."

Of course Hardcovers and Paperbacks can be discounted. Thanks to agency pricing ebooks can't, making them efectively often more expensive than their paper counterparts.

B, there are some Tor-Forge ebooks on sale right now, marked down very heftily to $2.99. It's hard to reconcile this with any general assertion that such things can't happen.

Lee @ 32

Mom and I both have Acer Iconia tablets, that we use at open houses, and that I use when I'm selling jewelry. I find that the picture quality is wonderful, the usability is lovely, and I'm running Android 3.2, which interfaces well with my phone and all the other apps in my life. This was a conscious decision on my part - I don't want to give Apple money, and certainly not an extra $200 for the privilege of iOS. I have most of the business based in Google, phones, tablets, mail, and apps, so that's what made sense for us. YMMV.

Thanks a ton, folks.

@#93, Bruce

A limited markdown by the publisher on a handful of titles is hardly comparible to a retailer being able to offer discounts and coupons on all books like they can with paper volumes.

Are we doing the Agent Model grudgewank debate again? Here? Really? "Oh, doing away with DRM, big deal, Tor -- you should have caved in to Amazon's demands when they blacklisted your authors, you Macmillan lackey, you!"

Is that what you want to do with your very first two posts on Making Light, B?

("View all by" is a wonderful thing.)

I just bought a Tor ebook because of this. Well, also because I want to read it, but your action moved it to the top of my purchase list. Thanks!

I bought a kindle a couple of years ago, and am very happy with Amazon and the Kindle, but who knows what the best platform will be 5 years from now. I admire Amazon's business model which tends to lock me into their ecosystem, but have also become very aware that I have invested so much money in the Kindle format that I will probably have to maintain a Kindle compatible device for the rest of my life. I really appreciate the flexibility that TOR is providing with the non DRM ebooks.

I have purchased a fair number of books from Baen directly - it is very easy to load them on the e-reader via Calibre; I initially thought Baen's business model of giving away so much content for free was insane, but I find that as I get sucked into reading new series I have spent a lot of money there - $48 yesterday for 3 monthly bundles.

I hope this ultimately affords TOR the flexibility to sell the books directly as well and perhaps experiment with alternate sales models.

You aren't actually limited in terms of devices except on the low end (ironically including the Kindle itself): general purpose devices (iToys, Android devices, many other subnotebooks and tablets, etc.) have official Kindle software available for them. You are reliant on that remaining available and compatible, but that's also true of the hardware: consider the possibility of a major change to WhisperSync which Amazon for some reason did not make backward compatible and did not release new compatible firmware for older Kindles, combined with the Kindle using Amazon's servers as transparent cloud storage.

@#97 ::: Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little,

Sorry you have such an apparent problem with me. I posted to this topic after being directed here from another posting somewhere else, never been here before. Did I say Tor dropping DRM wasn't a good thing? No, because I think it's great. All I said is Tor having 3 titles on sale isn't the same as the retailer being able to discount like they can with print books which often means the ebooks are more expensive. Doesn't mean I don't buy Tor ebooks, just that I wish there was a little flexibility in pricing.

B: The agency model has been discussed, at considerable length, on Making Light before now,here

You'll perhaps see from the length of that thread why people aren't necessarily keen to recapitulate the discussion here.

B, #101: When your first post presents "facts" not in evidence, and your second one is a classic example of goalpost-shifting after having your not-facts exposed as such, Nicole isn't going to be the only person having a problem with you.

The First Law of Holes: When you're in one, stop digging.

Anybody wanting to pursue the lines of argument B seems to be interested in should keep in mind that--for at least the foreseeable future--this site isn't the ideal place to do it, for reasons that should be obvious if you've been following the news.

#99, DBR: "I have invested so much money in the Kindle format that I will probably have to maintain a Kindle compatible device for the rest of my life."

Maybe not. Since you have Calibre, you're probably aware of how trivial it is to convert Amazon's MOBI files into EPUB files. DRM is the only obstacle, and it's entirely conceivable that this obstacle will fade away. It happened in music--indeed, Apple, the biggest vendor of DRM'd music tracks, wound up providing ways (some free, some not) for people to un-DRM many of their earlier purchases.

All self-published e-books that come from/through Smashwords are released without DRM.

I'm starting to see some self-published books in Amazon's Kindle store being identified by their authors as "DRM-free."

The Kindle version of the Absolute Visions spec fic anthology MacAllister Stone did with Absolute Write members is DRMless.

So is the print version ;)

Dave @67, Patrick @69: I can confirm that this statement is wrong. I have personally downloaded DRM-free ebooks from Amazon UK.

When you're uploading self-published books to Kindle, whether to use DRM is a radio-button that you select before uploading the text. All Madhouse Manor e-books are DRM-free (both at Amazon and at Smashwords).

Microsoft has paid B&N $300m for a share in the Nook and collegiate textbook parts of the business, which will also apparently put Nook reader software in the next Windows version.

Since the Nook is essentially ePub with DRM options this isn't going to help Amazon. It's also a struggling business selling of a chunk of the successful part of their business, for immediate ready cash, which might not help B&N very much in the longer term.

Congratulations on getting rid of DRM! I'll be loading up on DRM-free Tor books, and rebuying some of favorites from the backlist so I can carry them around everywhere. This makes me very happy, and should provide Tor with some much-deserved income.

That said, I think that next struggle will be geographic restrictions. Most North Americans who read English books are unfamiliar with just how painful and stupid the current situation is, and how much it's annoying people who live overseas.

Let me demonstrate this with a personal anecdote. I've been trying to buy French SF from Amazon.fr recently, because I love the idea of an ebook reader with a built-in dictionary.

Option 1: Don't read French SF, or at least not as an ebook

This option makes me sad. There are some very cool books I want to read, and some of them are only available for the Kindle. There's something hugely offensive about being told, "No, you're not allowed to read this book. Period."

And even when the book is available in print, it's not nearly so pleasant without a built-in dictionary. And international shipping is both expensive and bad for the environment.

Option 2: Outwit Amazon's geographical restrictions

At last count, this appears to require some combination of the following:

- A rooted Android device that sets up a transparent HTTP redirect using Linux firewall rules.
- A proxy server in France, preferably one that Amazon doesn't recognize.
- A French postal address.
- A French bank account.
- French residency papers and a willingness to fax them to an Amazon.fr employee. This is allegedly necessary if they see through any of the above.

Option 3: Pirate

This requires about 5 seconds.

I'm morally offended by option (3) and morally horrified by option (1). I'm having a hard time imagining that option (2) will ever be popular. Why is it so agonizingly hard to give authors money? And what's the morally correct choice here?

Now multiply by this by a several hundred million English speakers who live outside North America, and several hundred million English students. And think how many of them will decide that piracy is the only way to get books.

Still, it's better to celebrate battles won than to agonize over battles yet to come. I just installed Calibre, and my credit card and I are looking forward to some serious Tor goodness this summer.

Per #106 above, some self-published authors are using No DRM as a selling point.

Is um, the above a canned meat product?

what is the motivation? I see no attempt to sell anything, just a weblog with random verbiage in it.